


The Playlist

by orphan_account



Category: The X-Files RPF
Genre: Angst, F/M, Separation, music inspired
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-05
Updated: 2016-04-05
Packaged: 2018-05-31 11:02:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6467641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of ficlets. I've been really inspired by Gillian's iTunes playlist while writing my long form story and a lot of the songs I've found very moving, flashes of ideas for moments when the songs chosen would have been especially meaningful. These song-inspired ficlets explores some of those ideas. Total fiction.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Playlist

_2012_

A familiar guitar riff on my radio alarm wakes me with a wave of nostalgic sadness. If I've heard the rasping lament of this vocal less than a thousand times I'd be surprised. It carries me dreamlike to my dressing table, Stevie Nicks melancholia filling the empty walls of my home with unaviodable reminders that time is slipping away from me, gathering in the soft lines that laughter and sadness have carved in my face.

  
Some days this room seems full of light and promise. It did the night I said that I would live here and build a life with the man standing in front of me. It sang with happiness the first time I laid my baby son on the sheets of the bed where he began and there were days when I believed I would still be lying here, old and grey long after the world stopped caring who I was. But lately it's felt cold and I've felt alone here. Other parts of the house are still alive with the colour and chaos of family life but here, where our laughing likeness hangs laughing on a wedding white wall, something is missing.

  
That's when I hear the strings, an unexpected swell in a familiar recording that cracks something buried deep inside me, a sob rushing to the back of my throat. Across the room the radio, shouting from the silence of his ordered desk asks if I can handle the seasons of my life and I cross to our portrait and run my fingers over the curves of my partner's face, remembering.

  
Partner. So clinical and formal a word for what we used to be. That word had no place in the vocabulary of our early days when we were lovers, confidantes and antagonists, before routine and parenthood brought us down to earth and made us partners. Before I looked back.

  
It was so easy to look back, to fall back into a well worn and well loved dynamic. Though I never planned it, never dreamed of poisoning the new with the old it seemed that there was a flaw woven deep in to the fabric of my being. That I could reshape my life into something unrecognisable and still unravel when he pulled me to him. Partner had never been a word that fit that relationship. First we were co-stars, friends at a push. Then we hated each other, loved each other, tore each other apart and reformed, spitting out the taste of our caustic dependence but unable to forget the sweet high that came just before. Though it's buried deep in a drawer, I can see his face in the one photograph I have allowed myself to keep clearer that the image right in front of me. The alchemy of our shared gaze, the magnetism of his closeness. Even as a memory it draws me across the floor towards his likeness, like his presence had at the premiere, pulling me to his side against the anchor of my partner's child growing inside me.

  
It's so fucked up. It's all so fucked up.

  
I'm sat alone in a picture perfect home, crying over a man who loves me but I don't love and a man I love who can never be what I need. This is my landslide, it takes everything around me down and leaves me standing, lonely but clear that something has to change. For too long I have built my life on the foundation of somebody else. I have tried to be the Hollywood starlet, the ingenue, the serious actress and the dutiful mother. I have found parts of myself in each role but never the whole picture. And I'm running out of time. I'm getting older and I need to be the director of the next act of my life. Even if the cost is high.

  
For a moment I see the sweet faces of my sons in a photograph and waver, I would die to save them pain but a voice in my head tells me that I can only separate my unhappiness from them for so long, that some day they will be more injured by my dishonesty than protected by my sacrifice.

  
Which is how as the orchestra peaks and then drops to nothing I decide that it's over.

  
All of it.

  
That this faded fantasy of a home must be broken and that next time I remake myself I will somehow do it without the flaws of my past creeping back in. For the first time in so long I will speak honestly to both of the men in my life and I will tell them that I am done.

  
That I can't pretend to love him the way he deserves.

  
And that I can't keep loving him more than I love myself.

  
I don't know what comes next. A sea of strings and symphony to carry me away to a happier ending? Or a lone guitar fading to nothing. I guess I'll find out.

_So could you take this love and take it down_  
_Oh, if you climb a mountain and you turn around_  
_If you see my reflection in the snow covered hills_  
_Well, the landslide'll bring it down_

**Author's Note:**

> These are basically scribbles - no beta- written in a short space of time to try and capture the emotion of the song and how I imagine it influenced a moment in time. Forgive me my typos and I hope you enjoy my interpretations. -R


End file.
